Alan Jacobs

The home schooling movement, by contrast, has no access to funding nor any decision-making structure – but it has the advantage of having a much larger network of individuals potentially capable of committing resources to the project. One could imagine a Wikipedia-style process of textbook creation, where hundreds of thousands of home-schooling moms and dads donate a small portion of the time they already spend on teaching their kids to producing or editing material for the virtual textbooks they all use. You would, of course, need some kind of central structure to handle the programming – but even much of this could be relatively decentralized once the essential framework was in place.

Working either through the charter movement or the home schooling movement would enable a tablet textbook project to start small, yield immediate returns to participants, and scale easily, while largely ignoring the interests of incumbent institutions. And it wouldn’t require the sponsorship of an Apple or a Gates Foundation. Working through the regular public school system, which would certainly require some kind of megadollar sponsorship, would start big, would have to coopt the interests of incumbent institutions, and would make it difficult to impossible to actually yield quick returns to the most important participants: the teachers and students in the classroom. Which, unfortunately, has been the fate of all too many big-think reform proposals for the regular public schools. Much more sensible to build something in more natural laboratories for innovation, and then figure out how to “port” an already proven solution to the regular system.Working either through the charter movement or the home schooling movement would enable a tablet textbook project to start small, yield immediate returns to participants, and scale easily, while largely ignoring the interests of incumbent institutions. And it wouldn’t require the sponsorship of an Apple or a Gates Foundation. Working through the regular public school system, which would certainly require some kind of megadollar sponsorship, would start big, would have to coopt the interests of incumbent institutions, and would make it difficult to impossible to actually yield quick returns to the most important participants: the teachers and students in the classroom. Which, unfortunately, has been the fate of all too many big-think reform proposals for the regular public schools. Much more sensible to build something in more natural laboratories for innovation, and then figure out how to “port” an already proven solution to the regular system.

Books, I fancy, may be conveniently divided into three classes: —

(1) Books to read, such as Cicero’s Letters, Suetonius, Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Sir John Mandeville, Marco Polo, St. Simon’s Memoirs, Mommsen, and (till we get a better one) Grote’s History of Greece. (2) Books to re-read, such as Plato and Keats: in the sphere of poetry, the masters not the minstrels; in the sphere of philosophy, the seers not the savants. (3) Books not to read at all, such as Thomson’s Seasons, Rogers’s Italy, Paley’s Evidences, all the Fathers except St. Augustine, all John Stuart Mill except the essay on Liberty, all Voltaire’s plays without any exception, Butler’s Analogy, Grant’s Aristotle, Hume’s England, Lewes’s History of Philosophy, all argumentative books and all books that try to prove anything.

The third class is by far the most important. To tell people what to read is, as a rule, either useless or harmful; for, the appreciation of literature is a question of temperament not of teaching; to Parnassus there is no primer and nothing that one can learn is ever worth learning. But to tell people what not to read is a very different matter, and I venture to recommend it as a mission to the University Extension Scheme.

• Those that belong to the emperor
• Embalmed ones
• Those that are trained
• Suckling pigs
• Mermaids (or Sirens)
• Fabulous ones
• Stray dogs
• Those that are included in this classification
• Those that tremble as if they were mad
• Innumerable ones
• Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush
• Et cetera
• Those that have just broken the flower vase
• Those that, at a distance, resemble flies

Dream fluently, still brothers, who when young
Took with your mother’s milk the mother tongue,

In which pure matrix, joining world and mind,
You strove to leave some line of verse behind

Like still fresh tracks across a field of snow,
Not reckoning that all could melt and go.

In the west portal of Chartres Cathedral, a scribe at work.

The Giants’ win over the 49ers in a magnificent throwback conference championship game at Candlestick Park yesterday turned on two fumbles by 49ers punt returner Kyle Williams, an obscure second-year player. That made Kyle Williams personally responsible for ten points in a game that ended 20-17. And the Giants, interviewed in the happy haze of the winning locker room, casually noted a provocative element of their game plan: They’d targeted Williams for extra violence because they knew he had suffered several concussions in the past, and they think it worked.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor then writes, agreeing with Scalia’s trespass approach, but adding in a separate concurrence for herself alone, that actually anticipates being read by light bulb as opposed to flickering taper. Even though she’s looking forward and not backward, for Sotomayor, Scalia’s trespass-based approach is the better one: “When the Government physically invades personal property to gather information, a search occurs. The reaffirmation of that principle suffices to decide this case.”

Having said all this, Sotomayor then launches into a terrifying exposition about all the ways in which government surveillance no longer actually requires any physical intrusion, and she notes that Scalia’s majority opinion offers no future guidance for regulating such surveillance. Sotomayor cautions that new surveillance systems will fundamentally alter the relationship between government and citizens. She writes, “I would ask whether people reasonably expect that their movements will be recorded and aggregated in a manner that enables the Government to ascertain, more or less at will, their political and religious beliefs, sexual habits, and so on.” She goes on to warn about an even more worrisome violation of privacy when one’s personal information is voluntarily disclosed to third parties, noting, “I for one doubt that people would accept without complaint the warrantless disclosure to the government of a list of every Web site they had visited in the last week, or month, or year.” Because she joins on with Scalia’s majority opinion, however, these musings are—at least for now—just high-tech musings.

There have been three major changes to 21st century writing: (1) writing is more informal, or “looser”, as @wynkenhimself puts it; (2) writing is more voice-driven, more personal (you can get a sense of what the people above are like by reading their tweets and Facebook posts, and (3) writing is more audience-specific. The tweets and Facebook replies above were composed as part of a conversation with a person or specific group of people (me, or me and all my and their twitter and Facebook followers). All were written to me particularly (and they knew when they wrote them that I am a professor of writing and a writer interested in new technologies. Their responses may have been different if the question was asked, say, by their children). And, as @jbj and @wynkenhimself show, sometimes one reply to me leads to a new conversation between two other people.

It can be hard to know how to engage in this type of writing. You might feel a bit lost and unsure of the tropes of twitter, say. But chances are, you are more comfortable with writing than you were 10 years ago. Why? Because you do it more. Think about it. Today, you may text, email and Facebook dozens of times a day. In the 20th century, you may have gone weeks or months without ever writing anything (though you probably talked on the phone more than you do now).

Blogging demonstrates the persistence of a key truth in the history of reading, an insight as obvious to Tocqueville as it should be to most bloggers today. The insight is that readers, in a culture of abundant reading material, regularly seek out other readers, either by becoming writers themselves or by sharing their records of reading with others. That process, of course, requires cultural conditions that value democratic rather than deferential ideals of authority. But to explain how new habits of reading and writing develop, those cultural conditions matter as much—perhaps more—than economic or technological innovations. As Tocqueville knew, the explosion of newspapers in America was not just a result of their cheapness or their means of production, any more than the explosion of blogging is just a result of the fact that free and user-friendly software like Blogger is available. Perhaps, instead, blogging is the literate person’s new outlet for an old need. In Wright’s words, it is the need “to see more of what is going on around me.” And in print cultures where there is more to see, it takes reading, writing, and association in order to see more.

In the early 19th century Lord Byron was the most-quoted author, the most referred-to, the one who loomed largest in the collective consciousness of readers. Lord Byron also created a unique dynamic for his readers; they were fans of Byron but were also aware of being part of the community of Byron fandom, a fandom they actively organized and propagated. Byron fans felt they had a unique understanding of him and his work, and expressed this in their choice of excerpts from his works.

Often the poems were copied with a rigorous attention to the original text. But nearly as often, the commonplace compilers would edit the original text, deleting some lines and altering others, so that a love poem to a woman from a man would be changed to a love poem from a woman to a man. Comparisons of the original poems with what appears in commonplace books shows that commonplace compilers often sought out unauthorized versions of the poems, or original manuscripts (rather than the versions appearing in the published “authorized” or “complete” works). Dueling versions of a poem would often appear in a commonplace book, allowing for the compiler and her readers to write their own comments on which version was superior, or to suggest improvements to the poem.

Byron’s reaction to these changes was not what might be expected. He had his own commonplace book and actively participated in commonplace culture, happily writing quotes of his own work in his fans’ commonplace books and even commenting on their alterations of his own work.